Sight Unseen: I Stand Alone 2

I bring a gun to the film, a gun and enough money to buy the cinema I’m in enough times over to pile each one on top of the last till I reach deep space. That’s how perfectly moral I am. That’s how never wrong I am. But still I demand cushions for my seat from the popcorn stand. And the girl there serving, she knows how it is my arse is still sore from a thousand years of impecunious bending. Because I can, I plan to shoot her in the face on the way out. The hero of the film and I both wear uniforms. The logos are all on the back. The logos are all blood. Sometimes they spell out ‘justice’ in Frankish. It doesn’t matter, man: no one has ever been wrong and everything comes true. After all, I’m here for the drama of yet another butcher, here to watch his guts unfold. And it’s the same sorry chump: born French and eating cheese. Only this time his mother loves him too much, and his new father is the concentration camp commandant responsible for the death of the communist one. This new father has fucked every woman he has ever met. His semen is the stuff of legend. His son’s mental struggles begin and end with him. His stolen innocence returned a hundredfold. He becomes a butcher that vomits at the sight of meat. He saves up, buys himself a cow and marries it. He takes its virginity. The baby comes fast. Being a butcher he removes the tail – but the wife goes too, out the window in the rain. He blames the language barrier. He blames the five schoolchildren who broke without breaking her fall. The daughter eventually learns French, but her accent makes him sick. Her accent is meat, so he cuts till there isn’t one. She becomes a woman, and he makes pudding from the blood. No man will look at her, so he takes it on himself. They are illegally married and institutionalised at opposite ends of Paris on the same day. He butchers his thighs in his room at night. She imagines escaping through tunnels to green fields where women like her mother make cow eyes and chew. They survive by starting over. And I have this nagging in my head like I’ve seen all this before. And if I remember it right he’s about to blow her head off. But, no, wait! The bullets are expensive, and he’s out now so there’s rent, a bad place, and a temporary job, and a pregnant daughter who’s still locked up. It’s all turned out nice. Nice is what happens when you get old and your parents are still alive, when you can sit in front of the TV forever, and someone young and pretty is wiping your arse. I haven’t felt this good since the cinema I was in caught fire. On the screen a woman is choking. The inside of her mouth is dark. In the end her death is nothing special. The woman next to me looks devastated. She must be lonely. It’s as if she knows there are only ever memories of a life. I tell her I am afraid to die. That I want to make porn movies. That the state killed my baby. That when I wave my dick around she’d be advised not to look at my face. I remember how dull Paris is, how it was a cow was in a nightclub getting fucked to pieces. I also remember how life is all just memories of afternoons, and beautiful women in a bed you ignored. But worst of all I’m covered in pus. And I’ve too much stamina to avoid all this pain. And I can’t beg. Not at my age. And the abattoir is looking for people like me. I watch his daughter butchering a horse. It’s pure agony. I have nothing left. I scream like before I was born. It’s a man thing. After all, my father wore a crucifix. Taught me how pretending to love your wife has nothing to do with taking her up the Eiffel Tower and throwing her off the top. On this planet I’m getting ill. For the love of God is a death sentence. It’s why I mutilated it all like this. It’s why extinction isn’t coming to save me.